Time_USA_-_23_09_2019

6 Time September 23, 2019

FROM THE EDITOR 2050: THE FIGHT FOR EARTH

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This issue, if civilizaTion can get its act together,
might just mark a midpoint in TIME’s coverage of the big-
gest crisis facing our planet.
Three decades ago—at a moment when much of the
world was only beginning to wake up to the damage hu-
manity had been wreaking on its home—TIME convened
a group of 33 scientists and political leaders from five
continents in Boulder, Colo., to discuss the threat. The re-
sult was one of the best-known issues TIME has ever pro-
duced, sounding one of the louder alarms to date. In the
Jan. 2, 1989, issue, the editors named “Endangered Earth”
the most important story of the year, replacing the annual
“Person of the Year” with a planet, our own. The cover, by
the artist Christo, showed a 16-in. globe wrapped in plas-
tic and rag rope.
Three decades from now, we will be on the cusp of
2050, the year by which we must have already acted—
with urgency as outlined by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change—to have any chance of keeping
average global warming to 1.5°C above 19th century lev-
els. That is the line above which scientists agree that the
effects of climate change—extreme weather, rising seas,
wildfires, a deepening refugee crisis—will be even more
disastrous.
Human nature, like journalism, is deadline- oriented.
Our intent with this issue—only the fifth time in our his-
tory that we have turned over every page of a regular
issue, front to back, to a single topic—is to send a clear
message: we need to act fast, and we can. As TIME did
30 years ago, we’ve assembled some of the world’s most
influential voices on climate to lay a path forward, from
former Vice President Al Gore (who also contributed to
the 1989 issue) to the African activist Graça Machel to
Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun.

We also eXPloRe the essential role of innovation in
solving the crisis. And there is deep reporting from
every continent on the planet. Correspondent Matt
Sandy journeyed thousands of miles by road, boat and
small plane to the front lines of Amazon deforesta-
tion. Cape Town–based Aryn Baker visited the Great
Green Wall of Africa, an $8 billion agricultural proj-
ect to transform the lives of millions of people liv-
ing on another major climate-change front. Aryn
also ventured to one of the hottest cities on earth:
Jacobabad, Pakistan, where summer temperatures
regularly exceed 122°F.

TALK TO USTALK TO US

The sands of TIME

Edward Felsenthal,

ediTor-in-chief & ceo

@efelsenThal

At TIME.com/2050, you can down-

load an immersive 3-D journey into the

Amazon narrated by famed conserva-

tionist Jane Goodall, and see what it’s

like to be in Pakistan in the middle of a

deadly summer heat wave. We hope you

will also sign up for our new news letter,

One.Five, from TIME climate corre-

spondent Justin Worland; it will explore

the interconnectedness of climate with

other major issues and track progress

against the U.N.’s 2050 goals. And TIME

will be hosting two major summits in

New York this fall, with climate high on

both agendas.

Notably, what you will not find in

this issue are climate-change skeptics.

Core to our mission is bringing together

diverse perspectives. Experts can and

should debate the best route to mitigat-

ing the effects of climate change, but

there is no serious doubt that those ef-

fects are real. We are witnessing them

right in front of us. The science on

global warming is settled. There isn’t

another side, and there isn’t another

moment.

It is a moment we can rise to—and

that is the message of the cover of this

issue, a sand sculpture created on the

shores east of Tokyo by the Japanese

artist Toshihiko Hosaka and photo-

graphed by drone. Like the shared work

of mitigating climate change, Hosaka’s

cover is the result of collective action—a

seven-person team worked together for

14 days, dodging a typhoon along the

way, to create a visual statement out

of the earth itself.

△

Earth as Planet

of the Year—the

Jan. 2, 1989,

issue—at top,

and this week’s

cover, below